With advances in technology, information has become accessible via various resources. Papers have now been replaced with electronic documents that can be accessed using websites on the Internet on the World Wide Web. However, websites need to serve users regardless of their physical and psychological backgrounds. People who are disabled or differently-abled should be able to access information on the Internet without any difficulties. Web accessibility is the practice of developing websites that are easily accessible by people of different abilities or by people having disabilities.
People with disabilities include people having blindness, deaf or hard of hearing users, low-vision users, color blind users, users with motor disability impairing use of a keyboard or a mouse, and users with cognitive disabilities. Challenges faced by disabled people include, inability of visually challenged users to read images inability of hearing impaired users to access audio, inability of monochrome device users to differentiate between colors, and inability of old people to read small font text. Further, since a lot of Internet use nowadays relate to access and utilization of entertainment content, websites are generally designed using audio, video and colorful content including the use of images. For visually challenged users, screen reader softwares which read and interpret text on a screen cannot read images and this causes a lot of inconveniences to users of screen reader softwares. Users having cognitive disabilities include users having problems related to memory, problem-solving, attention, visual comprehension etc. Challenges faced by people having cognitive disabilities include, getting distracted by scrolling text, blinking icons or multiple pop-ups on a webpage, inability of people having visual comprehension difficulties in correlating photograph of a person with representation of a person, inability of a person with problem solving difficulties in navigating webpages with bad links etc. The accessibility challenges get intensified for web applications for interactive information sharing such as Web 2.0 applications because for such applications, users tend to be content producers and may not be able to produce accessible content.
To deal with the various challenges faced by users with disabilities, several standards and best practices have been developed to enable a web designer to make accessible web pages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international standards organization that regularly publishes web accessibility guidelines for web designers to design web accessible content. However, for the considerable volume of web pages already existing on the Internet, the task of employing skilled web designers to manually access web pages and point out non-adherence to standards as per W3C is very cumbersome and costly.
Methods and systems exist in the prior art for automatic web standard compliance testing for example, accessibility or usability testing of a website. In a web standard compliance testing, the HTML source of the web page is parsed and each HTML element is checked for its relevant web standard compliance. The most commonly used formats for output reports of such testing are HTML, XML, PDF, CSV and EARL. In all of these formats the actual HTML element on which the non-compliance of a standard is identified, is referred with a line number. This line number represents the position of the line in the HTML source code, on which the code for the HTML element begins. Though this approach helps testers and web developers in identifying the points of non-compliance, it has certain drawbacks.
Majority of the websites and web applications are developed using server-side web development technologies like ASP.NET, JAVA and PHP. Along with these technologies, WYSIWYG editors are used which helps the developers in visualizing the final rendered view of a web page. These development practices make web developers feel more comfortable with the back end code or the actual rendered view of the web page than with the automatically generated HTML and JavaScript code. Therefore a line number approach may not be of effective use to a web tester or developer, at least in cases where very large html and JavaScript codes are generated by server-side code. Thus, there is a need for a method of reporting web standard non-compliance that provides a more efficient way of referring to the points of non-compliance.
Moreover, the existing web standards non-compliance testing and reporting methods and systems provide an ad-hoc display of all the instances of web standard non-compliance on a web page with no degree of control over viewing such web standard non-compliance instances. The existing web standards non-compliance testing and reporting methods do not provide the users for example web testers, with flexibility to conduct testing and maintenance in a planned manner, phase wise manner. Thus, in view of the foregoing drawbacks of the existing web standards non-compliance testing and reporting methods and systems there is a need for methods and systems of web standards non-compliance testing and reporting which provide a high degree of control over viewing web standard non-compliance instances and facilitate flexible planned phase wise testing and maintenance of web standards non-compliance.